by Richard Farr

Historians often ask what led to Trump’s landslide victory back in 2024. All those guilty verdicts in the “PornHush” trial certainly helped — the final proof, for many, that the President was an innocent lamb set upon by crooks. And the November exit polls showed that millions of patriotic Americans found democracy a chore anyway, or were actively Fascism-curious, or simply got a buzz out of the fact that, being disempowered in every other meaningful way, they could at least step up and play a part in destroying their own children’s future. But surely the decisive factor was Trump’s inspired choice of running mate — philosopher and controversialist Thomas Hobbes. 

Sharp as a tack, a hard-bitten political realist, an intellectual heavyweight, and a precise, stylish communicator — he was so different from anyone else Trump could have chosen! The sore losers claimed he had not been born in the United States, or pointed out that he’d died in 1679. None of that mattered when the electorate saw what an ideal ticket it was.

Like the other VP aspirants, Hobbes described Trump as our only hope in dark times. In fact he iced that particular cake by calling him “our very Salvation, our Messiah, in whose Second Coming should we not earnestlie beleeve?” Like them, he also said that modern intellectual fads such as democracy, the separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, a free press and the rule of law were “monstrous and absurd Doctrines, manifest Phantasmes of Satan” and “beleeved in not, save by Idiots.” But he didn’t just say those things because it was the only way to land a lucrative government sinecure from which he he could denounce the evils of government, or because his highest aspiration was to visit Palazzo a Lago and rub shoulders with the shiftless rich. No — he said them because he could prove them.

His election-cycle bestseller Leviathan used rigor and logic to demonstrate two key political facts: 

First, the ideal system of government — indeed the only system of government a rational agent will choose — is absolute monarchy. Argument in a nutshell: (i) it’s not just Trump who’s a vicious, self-interested brute — we all are; (ii) human nature being so dire, safety is more important than liberty; (iii) sorry but you can’t have both. Read more »

Do Top Dogs Care

I place my body — life, in hands of
corporate heads and engineers
I am in my seat perched above a wing
and through this little porthole peer.

I slide my sight along its graceful lines,
to its distant tip, vague among clouds.
We’re far from earth up here.

I know this wing’s shape from books,
a form imagined by the brothers Wright
and other seers; a shape that lifts and
holds us up, aloft, until a runway meets
our landing gear, until all nuts and bolts
designed to be just here, just there,
perfectly in place, set and tightened
to the breadth of a hair are proved in hope
that no other inclination drives the calculus,
trusting that the bottom line of corporate worth
is not the top line for which its top dogs care,

Jim Culleny, 5/31/24

by David J. Lobina

In previous posts on AI [sic], I have argued that contemporary machine learning models, the dominant approach in AI these days, are not sentient or sapient (there is no intelligence on display, only input-output correlations), do not exhibit any of the main features of human cognition (in particular, no systematicity), and in the instantiation of so-called large language models (LLMs), there is no natural language in sight (that is, the models make no use of actual linguistic properties: no phonology or morphology, no syntax or semantics, never you mind about pragmatics).

The claim about LLMs is of course the most counterintuitive, at least at first, given that a chatbot such as ChatGPT seemingly produces language and appears to react to users’ questions as if it were a linguistic agent. I won’t rerun the arguments as to why this claim shouldn’t be surprising at all; instead, I want to reinforce the very arguments to this effect – namely, that LLMs assign mathematical properties to text data, and thus all they do is track the statistical distribution of these data – by considering so-called adversarial attacks on LLMs, which clearly show that no meaning is part of LLMs, and moreover that these models are open to attacks that are not linguistic in nature. It’s numbers all the way down!

An adversarial attack is a technique that attempts to “fool” neural networks by using a defective input. In particular, an adversarial attack is an imperceptible perturbation to the original sample or input data of a machine learning model with the intention to disrupt its operations. Originally devised with machine vision models in mind, in these cases the technique involves adding a small amount of noise to an image, as in the graphic below for an image of a panda, with the effect that the model misclassifies the image as that of a gibbon, and with an extremely high degree of confidence. The perturbation in this case is so small as to have no effect to the visual system of humans – another reason to believe that none of these machine learning models constitute theories of cognition, by the way – but the perturbation is the kind of mathematical datum that a mathematical model such a machine learning model would indeed be sensitive to (all graphics below come from here). Read more »

Vivian Maier. October 29, 1953, NY, NY.

More here and here.

Current show.

by Gus Mitchell

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.

Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.

His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.

Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19^th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)

Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.

It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike Bendzela

The week before Memorial Day, I’m back to my old tricks again, poisoning pests in my little orchard. It’s the period after petal fall, when the romance of bloom season gives way to the horrors of war. Commencing in mid-May in Maine, I walk among fruit trees amidst a profusion of blossoms; but by the end of the month, I lie awake at night worrying over a contingent of apple pests — I know I’m going to be busy for a few weeks. I’ve written previously about the trials of raising a species (Malus sieversii) originally from Kazakhstan in the ghastly climate of northern New England. The pests of the northeast — natives such as plum curculio and flatheaded appletree borer, and introduced invaders such as European sawfly and codling moth — have brilliantly adapted themselves to our New World orchards. You have to admire the intrepid little buggers for fulfilling their Darwinian duties so efficiently.

One cannot reach a truce with creatures whose brains are smaller than the tip of a pen. Plant a buffet of fruits that insects like — apples, pears, plums, and peaches — and don’t be surprised if they show up for the feast — in droves. And so, I must strap on a backpack sprayer, or hook a thirty-gallon tank to the back of my riding mower, and start killing. If I want table-quality heritage apples to sell to local markets, I have to resign myself to the equivalent of waging a napalm campaign against my arthropod companions. Does farming have to be like this, even on such a small scale? Must we slaughter our competitors? This question bugs me to no end. Read more »

New growth, even on the evergreen trees, in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Bill Murray

A nasty typhoon punished southeast Africa in early 2023. Cyclone Freddy dropped six months of rain in six days, killed 1400 and pounded the poor, overmatched region for thirty-eight long days. From its origins in the Indonesian archipelago, Freddy wound up across the entire breadth of the Indian Ocean before battering the continent, reversing course, then returning to do it again. It was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded.

Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique almost never get good press. The modest coverage of last year’s hurricane that struck twice paled alongside coverage of a terror attack in 2021 in the northern Mozambican coastal town of Palma. Survivors recount an utterly harrowing siege, an attack so ferocious that French energy giant Total fled from its $20 billion liquified natural gas investment there, and operations have yet to resume.

Around 200 Black locals and 20 expat contractors found themselves holed up inside the Amarula Palma Hotel. Authorities called in South African private military company Dyck Advisory Group and, as Amnesty International described things,

After the majority of the white contractors and a few well-off Black nationals – among them the Administrator for Palma – were rescued, those left behind attempted to flee by ground convoy but were ambushed by ‘Al-Shabaab.’

This isn’t the better known Al-Shabaab, but rather a local and more rag-tag group loosely affiliated with other Islamic insurgents. Theirs is a shaky, patchwork ideology incorporating local grievances, like Total’s control over local mineral wealth.

Several countries, Angola, Botswana, Rwanda, South Africa maintain a peacekeeping presence in northern Mozambique now and low level fighting is still going on, 36 months later. The poor governance and political instability that give rise to insurgencies like these color the rest of our story. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

The “frozen trucker case” got a fair amount of attention a few years back. At Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing Senator Al Franken hammered him about it. You can watch it here. The facts of the case are these:

Alphonse Maddin was employed as a truck driver by Petitioner TransAm Trucking (“TransAm”). In January 2009, Maddin was transporting cargo through Illinois when the brakes on his trailer froze because of subzero temperatures. After reporting the problem to TransAm and waiting several hours for a repair truck to arrive, Maddin unhitched his truck from the trailer and drove away, leaving the trailer unattended. He was terminated for abandoning the trailer.

Maddin challenged his discharge in a proceeding before an Administrative Law Judge and won. TransAm appealed to the Administrative Review Board, and Maddin won again. TransAm then appealed to the Court of Appeals, which issued its decision in August of 2016, more than seven years after the incident.

The 10^th Circuit found in Maddin’s favor, with Gorsuch in dissent. All that is water under the bridge. Today Gorsuch has a life appointment to the Supreme Court, and Franken is back in private life. But it is worth revisiting the case for what it can tell us about legal reasoning and judicial decision making. Read more »

—“For all practical purposes a lie is as true
as the bias of its believer.” —Roshi Bob

Plum of a Lie

If I told you a lie
would you believe it?

….. Will it be a true lie? Will it
….. pierce my bias to the bone? Will it
….. meet my need?

Does that matter?

….. As sure as my world is flat, it does.

It would be a help then?

….. I cannot believe without a true lie
….. therefore, please tell me a plum of a lie,
….. gild it, make it sing, craft it so well
….. I’ll not know, have it swell,
….. have its juice challenge the
….. breadth of the universe

Shall I then?

….. Please, please—

.Jim Culleny,
3/27/18

by Martin Butler

The expression ‘Live your best life’ is very much in vogue. It appears more than 3 million times in Instagram posts, which are no doubt full of pictures of smiling attractive 20-somethings completing amazing sporting feats, strolling along glorious beaches or doing exciting things in exotic places. Working 12 shifts delivering parcels for Amazon presumably doesn’t make the grade. As with many other inspirational (or is it aspirational) sayings that pepper the internet, perhaps we should dismiss this expression as just part of the froth produced by internet influencers desperate for our attention. But what does its popularity say about our times? Let’s look beyond the predictable healthy lifestyle stuff and try to actually make sense of it as a philosophical idea. After all, if interpreted generously, it does have a certain philosophical pedigree.

To start with, what does best actually mean? It very much depends on how we view human beings. Regarded in a narrowly hedonic way, where the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, our best life would be one where we avoid as much pain and experience as much pleasure as possible.  This is clearly implausible for many reasons, one being the conclusion of Nozick’s powerful thought experiment: few would regard their best life as being permanently hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ which eliminated pain and provided you with nothing but delightful pleasure. The passive experiencing of pleasure would not be enough. A best life surely requires that we participate in meaningful activities which lead to fulfilment and flourishing, a point which tends to lead to a more individualistic notion. Most people are roughly similar in terms of what they find pleasurable and painful; masochists excepted, human beings tend to find physical injury painful and sweet food pleasant. This is not the case, however, with regards to living a fulfilling life. I personally wouldn’t find a life dedicated to martial arts, rock climbing or running marathons fulfilling, but for many these activities are deeply fulfilling. So is there something distinctively modern about the individualism implicit in living your best life? Read more »

Latifa Echakhch. Taqsim, 2017.

Fresco, installation.

More here and here.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

A little over a year ago, in Allen, Texas, we saw the precise moment when a “good guy with a gun” became a “bad guy with a gun.” It turns out that the line between these two different types of people (and there are only two, we’re told) is as slight as a finger squeezing a trigger. Certainly nothing prior to that trigger-squeeze at the Allen Premium Outlets was illegal. In Texas, as of 2021, someone can legally carry eight guns in public – without a license or permit of any kind. 

Under Texas’ recently expanded “open carry” law, you can take as many guns as you want into a library. You can take as many guns as you want into the state Capitol building in Austin. You can take as many guns as you want with you while walking down the street.

This is called freedom.

It’s a freedom that requires you to accept some logical catch-22s, though. For example, the dividing line between a law-abiding citizen exercising his supposed right to bear arms and a mentally unstable man who should never have had a gun in the first place is only discernible after he has killed people. Once someone becomes a gun-wielding maniac, they retroactively never should have been allowed to have a gun. (It’s a shame they don’t have the courtesy to tell us ahead of time that they’re the bad guys.)

You can get around this conundrum if you believe in a world where people are either all good or all bad, and we can tell the difference. Gun extremists believe in a fairytale world split into dark and light. They would have us believe that it’s just a matter of finding out who falls into which camp. The forces for good get as many guns as they want and are trusted implicitly, and the forces of darkness are (somehow, without legislative intervention) kept from getting guns. And then the good guys with guns keep us safe from the bad guys with guns. Just like in stories.

But notably, and tragically, this is precisely what does not tend to happen during mass shootings in the real world. This is not what happened at the Parkland school shooting or the Orlando nightclub shooting. This is not what happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, either. The good guys with guns just stood there, scared out of their minds, while people died. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

An excerpt of Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming novel, Parade, appeared in the Financial Times last week. The story features two narratives, one about a female painter simply referred to as “G,” told in third person, and another about a group of people visiting a farm in the countryside, told in first person plural. It is unclear how these two stories intersect in terms of plot—is G the narrator of the second story? Is she the woman living on the farm?—but these are not questions worth asking. Thematically, the two stories fit together as they both tell of women constrained and controlled by male figures of authority: in this case, their husbands.

Nestled within this narrative is a fascinating articulation of a theory of art, which is what I will focus on in this essay. Cusk does not pause the story to explain this theory, as some purveyors of “autofiction” might do, but embeds it within the story by explaining G’s different artistic periods and the way her art relates to her personal life. The story is stronger because of this.

In the beginning of G’s career, she is seemingly self-taught, lacking formal and technical skill but compensating for it with inspiration and honesty. Her painting is described as existing “autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there.” In this characterization, G is simply the vessel giving shape to an artistic drive she scarcely understands, rather than the source of its creation. Read more »